Category: David

Blossom on the blackthorn hedge on the side of the Smestow Valley Nature Reserve’s Barley Field. By the time I had got out to visit the spot, the flowers were beginning to go over.

Mary Arden’s Farm in Wilmcote has a selection of traditional breeds of farm stock, to create a visitor experience of a farm in Shakespeare’s time, and eventually destined to be a source of supply for the tables of the restaurants in the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust properties.

These four Oxford sandy and black pigs bring the total up to three types of pigs on the farm this year.

Spring flowers – these one one of the crab apple trees growing at the back of Compton Lock.

More goats from the rare breeds collection at Mary Arden’s Farm, Wilmcote, including one busily eating the fodder put out on the other side of the fence in the next pen.

New Place, with its Knot Garden and Great Garden, has the most elaborate planting of the various Shakespeare Birthplace Trust properties in and around Stratford on Avon. Here a selection of the tulips flowering there last month.

Flowers in a large clump of marsh marigolds by the Compton Park pool. As I took the pictures, a fly was emerging from deep in one of the flowers.